Oh. That's a
joke?Huh. I had no idea.
Perhaps I should have said, "Bitter, mirthless joke."
If scientists spend a decade after their PhDs earning $40K a year in five jobs that last 2 years each, that may be good for society, if those scientists do important research. It stinks for the scientists themselves, of course. I started this thread because I don't want young people to be deceived.
How is it good for society? Most of them end up working outside their fields, which is a huge waste of their education. Worse, postdocs are only semi-independent and generally have to stick to areas that their bosses are interested in. This approach stifles innovative research by relative newcomers and discourages the truly risky work that fails much of the time but yields the critical breakthroughs that are essential for true scientific progress.
A bit OT, but the whole publish-or-perish and get-grants-or-perish system discourages risky work. Risky work takes time: you can't publish three papers a year if you're doing something that takes five to seven years to develop. You will never get tenure if you are five years in and haven't published a single paper.
Academic science in the US (and elsewhere) is currently focused almost exclusively on incremental work (with no guarantees that the increments are meaningful). In the past, there was a balance between the quirky visionary types and the people who could take a good theory, crank through it and develop it well. Not these days: quirky types who take a while to develop an offbeat idea aren't really part of universities now. They can't compete with the incremental types when judged with today's industrial metrics of science: impact factors, number of citations per paper, number of annual publications, etc.
If your grant application isn't highly likely to generate two to three papers in three years, you won't get funded. Again, this shuts out risky science, keeps those postdocs cranking out data, and ensures that science is incremental.
Part IV of The Trouble with Physics makes this point very eloquently.
